The Bells of Kallio Church

Heikki Klemetti [fi] arranged the chorale without permission.

Helsinki's Kallio Church in the year of its inauguration (1912)

The church contains seven bronze church bells in its steeple, four of which are utilized in Sibelius's piece.

On 13 July 1908, construction began on a new Lutheran church in the Kallio subdistrict of Helsinki; the Finnish architect Lars Sonck designed the building, which stylistically incorporates both national romantic and Art Nouveau influences. The steeple of Kallio Church contains a carillon of seven bronze church bells (pitched D♯¹ to C♯² and weighing a total of 4,800 kilograms), which were commissioned from the celebrated Apolda-based, German clockmaker Franz Schilling & Söhne [de]; the clock and playing drum mechanism, in turn, was built by Bokelmann & Kuhlo [de].^[1]

In 1910, Sibelius broke off work on the Fourth Symphony (1911) to hold discussions with the church's building committee, which hoped the composer would provide a melody for the mechanized carillon.^[3] Sibelius accepted the offer, and even consulted—along with the Finnish composers Oskar Merikanto and Ilmari Krohn [fi]—on the make and pitching of the bells.^[1] By January 1911, however, Sibelius had still not settled on a melody, although he toyed with the idea of using the last few measures from his Second Symphony (1902).^[4]

The Bells of Kallio Church premiered on Sunday, 1 September 1912.^[2] For this occasion, the Finnish choral master Heikki Klemetti [fi] arranged the chorale (without Sibelius's blessing and, thus, to his annoyance) to a poem by Julius Engström [fi], the priest of the new church.^[2] Klemetti's intrusion confused the Finnish press: some newspapers credited both men for the tune, while a few others—such as Helsingin Sanomat and Hufvudstadsbladet—omitted Sibelius's name entirely.^[2]

"Klemetti's attempt at the bell tune for the inauguration annoyed me", Sibelius confided in his diary. "I was furious but, after a couple of hours, became wholly indifferent to his impudence".^[5]

Sibelius, in a move intended to reclaim sole artistic ownership of The Bells of Kallio Church, arranged the piece for solo piano a few days after the consecration; on 13 September, he supplanted Klemetti's arrangement with his own for mixed choir a cappella.^[2] Sibelius sold both arrangements in October to the Leipzig-based music publisher Breitkopf & Härtel. According to the musicologist Sakari Ylivuori, an authority on Sibelius's choral music, the autograph manuscript of the arrangement for mixed choir contains no text underlaid, apparently because Sibelius had disliked Engström's "mediocre" poem and had hoped that the Finnish poet Otto Manninen would contribute a new text. In the end, Sibelius settled—ironically—for a new lyrics penned by Klemetti, which Breitkopf received on 17 December.^[2]